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The number of Black men earning doctorate degrees and teaching in the academy is dwindling. This chapter focuses on the relevance and existence of Black males in doctoral programs and in the professoriate as full-time tenured, tenure-tracked, assistant, associate, and full professors, and presents analogous data on the demography of these two groups. The author, a Black male professor at a majority White research institution, uses introspection as a foundational theme to illuminate this national data. Such self-analysis will serve to move readers beyond the statistics to the challenges that belie the meager numbers of Black male doctoral students and professors.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have a long history of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As we move through the twenty-first century, the color lines of persons working at and attending them is changing, creating a caramelizing of HBCUs. Therefore, this chapter identifies the challenges associated with the growing number of non-Black students and faculty at HBCUs. Furthermore, it uses the notion of “othermothering” to address those issues via ethic of care, advancement of culture, and guardian of the institute. Strategies include same- and other-race mentoring, service-learning projects, safe places for racial identity development, the divine nine, homecoming and bowl game awareness, autoethnography, HBCU e-learning series, and teaching support for teaching diverse student learners.

The severe underrepresentation of African American males in counseling and psychology is significant, especially in light of these fields’ mandates as health professions. In this chapter, I will use a within-race intersectionality paradigm (gender, class, skin color) to inform my analysis of factors that affect the presence of African Americans males on counseling and psychology faculties. I will briefly elucidate factors that, early on, effectively “weed out” African American males from the pool of aspirants for higher education, and thence, from counseling and psychology programs and faculties. I will apply cooperative inquiry – a radical peer-to-peer research method regarded as a well-developed action research approach – to explore Black males’ experience along a range of narratives.

The purpose of this study is to examine how intersecting oppressed identities shape the socialization experiences of Black women doctoral candidates in agricultural disciplines at historically white institutions. This paper addresses a gap in literature examining the experiences of Black women within the context of higher agricultural sciences education.

This study uses narrative inquiry to examine the experiences of five Black women doctoral candidates through a set of three interviews per participant.

Three themes regarding participants’ socialization experiences were identified. Themes are presented according to its site of socialization: lack of trust in advising relationships, departmental belonging and negative interactions with department faculty and isolation and exclusion at conferences.

This study adds to the small body of research on Black women in higher agricultural sciences education. Further, this study contributes to the larger body of socialization research and the minimal research on socialization for marginalized populations in higher agricultural sciences education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of mentoring in higher education between Black and White male faculty and Black students at a highly selective, predominantly White institution (PWI) of higher education in the USA. The study aims to elucidate the cross‐racial aspects of mentorship and the impact of gender on mentoring relationships.

The paper consists of a phenomenological study utilising theories of cross‐racial and cross‐gender mentoring, and included eight participants, twice interviewed in depth about their formative experiences and mentoring practices regarding Black students. The data were analysed using a cross‐sectional code‐and‐retrieve method.

The paper provides insights about how Black men leveraged experiences parallel to those confronted by their Black protégés, while White men accessed proximal experiences of difference to relate to Black mentees – and additionally utilized interpersonal networks to enhance their mentorship by relying on colleagues of color who had greater familiarity with challenges faced by students.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability to populations; however, the theoretical contributions of the study are significant, suggesting that researchers explore cross‐race and cross‐gender mentoring arrangements in future research.

The paper includes implications for regarding the role and position of White males in academic settings as mentors across race and gender, and for the role of age for men serving in the role of mentors.

The paper contributes to the literature on cross‐racial mentoring in higher education, and further explores the impact of gender on mentoring, within the context of a highly competitive academic setting.

Research literature examining the experiences of faculty of color, particularly women in higher education, reveals a pattern of institutional and attitudinal barriers, which is directly linked to successful recruitment and retention of learners and faculty of color (Brayboy, B. M. (2003). The implementation of diversity in predominately White colleges and universities. Journal of Black Studies, 34(1), 72–87; Gregory, 2001; Hughes, R. L., & Howard-Hamilton, M. F. (2003). Insights: Emphasizing issues that affect African American women. In: M. F. Howard-Hamilton (Ed.), New directions for student services. Meeting the needs of African American women (104, pp. 95–104). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; Park, J. J., & Denson, N. (2009). Attitudes and advocacy: Understanding faculty views on racial/ethnic diversity. The Journal of Higher Education, 80(4), 415–438; Project MUSE; Stanley, C. A. (Ed.) (2006). Faculty of color: Teaching in predominantly White colleges and universities. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishers; Turner, 2002; Watson & Shealey, 2010). This chapter provides a review of the recent and relevant research on Black women in teacher education. In addition, the authors conducted a review of research specifically addressing the experiences of Black women in teacher education during the last 10 years. Findings from this summative analysis highlight recent research on the experiences of Black women faculty and shed light on the implications for future research as well as leadership and program development.

Prior to the 1970s, the enrollment of black students in U.S. medical schools was less than 3%. One-third of these students attended the three historically black medical schools that existed at that time. In 1970, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), representing the nation's medical schools, made a commitment for reaching parity of black medical student enrollment to that of the proportion of blacks in the U.S. population. The goal was that the enrollment of black students should reach 12% of total medical school enrollment. Within four years the enrollment of black students more than doubled to 7.5% by 1974. This greater than 100% enrollment increase was attributed to medical schools’ change in their commitment to affirmative action (Petersdorf, Turner, Nickens, & Ready, 1990; Cohen, Gabriel, & Terrell, 2002).

The nation's first Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were founded before the end of the U.S. Civil War. However, most were established in the post-Civil War era, through the Freedmen's Bureau and other organizations such as the American Missionary Association (AMA) when the U.S. federal government initiated an organized effort to educate newly freed slaves (Hoffman, 1996). Additional support for HBCUs arose from the second Morrill Act of 1890, which provided opportunities for all races in those states where Black students were excluded from public higher education. Thus, since their founding in the 1800s, the nation's HBCUs have had as their missions to provide access to higher education for the disenfranchised and underprivileged of our society. Today, these institutions continue to make significant contributions in educating African American and other underrepresented minority students, particularly in the areas of science and engineering. Although they comprise only 3% of U.S. institutions of higher education, HBCUs in 2008 awarded 20% of the baccalaureate degrees earned by Blacks in science and engineering (National Science Foundation, 2011).

Black women faculty are experiencing multiple marginalities within their intersectional identities (Thomas & Hollenshead, 2001). The overwhelming obstacles that they face in academia regarding racism, lack of mentorship, and its impact on productivity are well documented (Allen, Huggins-Hoyt, Holosko, & Briggs, 2018). However, through a raced and gendered intersection centering Black women, these workplace obstacles can transform into something far more insidious (Young & Hines, 2018). Black women academics do not enter academic environments that have been liberated from racism, sexism, or misogynoir; instead, the environment itself is a microcosm of the world in which they reside (Thompson, 2020). Black women academics are double minorities and face issues such as isolation from collegial networks; lack of institutional/departmental support; forced positionality into the role of mentorship for students of color; and increased visibility and bodily presentation concerns (Allen et al., 2018; Pittman, 2010). Further still, the workplace dynamics and needs of students of color can collide within the work of Black women academics, increasing the prevalence of othermothering and a racialized and gendered racial uplift (Griffin, 2013; Mawhinney, 2011). Though previous studies have demonstrated positive effects of university diversification, women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and religious minorities continue to face antagonistic environments (Cunningham, 2009; Hughes & Howard-Hamilton, 2003). Rooted within Black Feminist Thought and Critical Race Theory, this chapter aims to highlight the intersectional identities of Black women academics and identifies mechanisms to address how Black women are experiencing multiple marginalities within their intersectional identities (Hirshfield & Joseph, 2012).

This chapter explores the potential of African American male faculty and staff members to serve as mentors to high-profile African American male student-athletes at large, predominantly White institutions (PWIs) of higher education. These students are a large and very visible subset of the African American male student population at these institutions and often influence how African American male students are viewed and treated by other faculty, students, and the university communities at large. Based on empirical research and combined classroom and administrative experience of over 35 years, this chapter will present the issues that African American male student-athletes face as they transition into these institutions utilizing the athletic identity, transition, and mentoring frameworks and provide solutions for administrators and faculty members to use in their efforts to help guide these students toward achieving athletic, academic, and personal success.